No thanks: Aggies say facing Longhorns in regular season no longer an option

COLLEGE STATION – Texas A&M’s brass has changed its tune on whether the Aggies hope to ever play the Texas Longhorns again in football – at least in the regular season.

“We hope to play them again in a BCS or playoff game at some point,” A&M senior associate athletic director Jason Cook told me this afternoon.

That’s a far cry from A&M president R. Bowen Loftin’s assertion from two years ago that the Aggies, who were then preparing for a shift from the Big 12 to the Southeastern Conference, would agreeably take on the Longhorns any time and anywhere, as nonconference foes.

Since then, A&M has enjoyed early success and loads of national exposure in the SEC, and plenty of its fans have shifted from believing they’d like to see the Thanksgiving tradition continue versus the Longhorns to simply, “No thanks.” The Aggies, too, are set to start playing new SEC rival LSU on Thanksgiving or Thanksgiving weekend starting next year.

The idea that the Aggies and Longhorns might someday meet again in the regular season had been sparked by UT announcing it was hiring Steve Patterson from Arizona State as its new athletic director, in replacing longtime AD DeLoss Dodds. The Austin American-Statesman’s Kirk Bohls posted on his Twitter page earlier today that he was “told by a higher-up Longhorn that the Texas-Texas A&M rivalry ‘perhaps’ could resume.”